Word: caravans
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...reached its peak. All week long, the lower-class fellahin poured into the city. They came on foot or riding donkeys, aboard bicycles or cars or ancient trucks, clinging precariously to the roofs and sides of trains rolling into the city's Central Station. Like members of some giant caravan at rest, they camped all over Cairo. They watched the comings and goings at the Kubbeh Republican Palace, where dignitaries made solemn calls. They wept at the new Nasr Mosque in the suburb of Manshiet al Bakri, where laborers silently dug a five-foot crypt...
Finally came the moment for which the caravan had gathered. Flying low over the Nile, four Soviet-built helicopters landed beside a palace on Gezira Island, the original headquarters of Nasser's Revolutionary Command Council. From the lead copter, a flag-draped coffin was unloaded and strapped to a gun carriage pulled by six black horses. A funeral cortege formed, with a troop of lance-bearing cavalrymen leading the way. Six military bands, the morning sun glinting richly off their brass, struck up the melancholy strains of Chopin's Funeral March. Twenty-seven visiting chiefs of state, eleven Prime Ministers...
...throne were saved by the intervention of British paratroopers. In Amman, the boy King took the train of events heavily. "I have received confirmation of the murder of my cousin, King Feisal of Iraq, and all his royal family," he told reporters. "They are only the last in a caravan of martyrs...
That Hashemite caravan has been a long and winding one. The principal reason for the fanatic support that Hussein received from Bedouin warriors in Jordan is that the King can trace his ancestry back to the Prophet Mohammed. Thirty-seven generations of Hashemites were traditionally Grand Sherifs, or rulers of Mecca, Islam's holiest city, until they were forced out in the early 1920s by the Saud family. At the time of the Saudi takeover, the Grand Sherif of Mecca was Hussein, great-grandfather of the boy Kings. The Sherif thought he had found a way to refurbish...
...Manson, Bugliosi said, the meaning of helter-skelter was clear: a violent black uprising against whites. Manson would escape it by leading his drugs-and-sex caravan of followers into the California desert, but first he would precipitate helter-skelter by making other whites think it had arrived. That is why the words were written in blood when Mr. and Mrs. Leno LaBianca, a middle-aged couple, were murdered in their home in the Los Feliz area the night after the Tate killings...